The present invention relates to the electrical, electronic and computer arts, and, more particularly, to cloud computing infrastructure, and the like.
Even though the cloud has long been thought of as a way to obtain on-demand computing resources, the very definition of on-demand seems to be challenged by new applications. Whereas by-the-hour time granularity once was considered fine-grained, for new computing domains, such as Internet of Things or Network Function Virtualization (NFV), it is desirable to command resources as a much finer granularity to react to an event from one of potentially thousands of sources.
Recently, unikernels have emerged as an exploration of minimalist software stacks to improve the security, performance, and management (especially related to “immutable infrastructure” concepts) of applications in the cloud. Unikernels are specialized, single address space machine images constructed by using library operating systems. A developer selects, from a modular stack, the minimal set of libraries which correspond to the operating system (OS) constructs required for his or her application to run. These libraries are then compiled with the application and configuration code to build fixed-purpose images (unikernels) which run directly on a hypervisor or hardware without an intervening OS such as Linux or Windows.